Happy new year! I’m back in San Francisco after a whirlwind holiday tour that took me to Boston, New York, Seattle and a few cities in between. Now, as I train myself to stop writing “2018” on all my documents, I’m starting to dive into the work of figuring out what lies ahead for California wine this year.

Here are five of the big ideas that are defining the wine beat right now.

1. Are California wine regions, especially Napa Valley, running out of land? For the Napa wine industry, 2018 was a watershed year: the 50th anniversary of the Napa Valley Agricultural Preserve — the first such conservation effort in the country — and the year when the county voted down Measure C, a ballot initiative that would have limited further vineyard plantings in the Napa Valley hillsides. I wrote extensively about Measure C and the Ag Preserve; looked at why a luxury wine estate was popping up in Pope Valley, in the spurned outskirts of Napa County; and followed one woman who dreamed of planting a vineyard but kept hitting roadblocks. More and more folks want a piece of Napa Valley now, but there’s not much more of Napa to go around. Is the Gold Rush over?

Carina De La Cruz trims and maintains the Renteria Vineyards on Wednesday, July 19, 2017, in Napa, Calif.

Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle

3. How will immigration continue to shape California agriculture? The dynamics between immigration and California agriculture have never been more complicated than they are today, as workers who traditionally filled vineyard roles are leaving for jobs in construction, in restaurants — or leaving the U.S. altogether. Part of the effect of this exodus has been an increase in the ranks of women vineyard workers, a phenomenon I examined in detail. It seems clear that mechanization, too, will continue to replace human labor. How else will immigration issues be reflected in wine this year?

4. Will wine go fully mainstream? Among my most fun assignments last year was a story about Alecia Moore, also known as the pop star Pink, launching an estate winery, and a piece about the NBA’s newfound obsession with wine. Celebrities getting into the wine game is nothing new, but I suspect that the seriousness of these wine passions can tell us something about the shifting role of wine in popular culture.

5. What will be the Court of Master Sommeliers’ next move? Ever since the CMS announced in October that it was invalidating results from this year’s master sommelier exam due to evidence of cheating, the organization has kept mostly mum. What we do know: In early December, the CMS held the first of three re-testing opportunities for those whose titles had been stripped, and out of 30 test takers, six passed. In the new year, will the CMS reveal more details about how the cheating occurred? And more important, will we learn anything about the dynamics within the CMS, and the sommelier world more broadly, that may have led to this cheating in the first place?

We’ll all just have to stay tuned. Happy 2019, everyone.

Drinking with Esther is a weekly newsletter from The Chronicle’s wine critic. Follow along on Twitter: @Esther_Mobley and Instagram: @esthermob

Wine critic Esther Mobley joined The Chronicle in 2015 to cover California wine, beer and spirits. Previously she was an assistant editor at Wine Spectator magazine in New York, and has worked harvests at wineries in Napa Valley and Argentina. She studied English literature at Smith College.